At the same time, an unprecedented amount of private conversation happens using phones, raising the stakes and the default expectation of privacy.
The pendulum swung from insane dragnet surveillance to widespread availability of tech that is resistant to all but the most sophisticated surveillance efforts.
Interesting times!
It's only very recently that people have been communicating over the internet, allowing the mass surveillance. All encryption does is return us back to the pre 1990s in terms of surveillance capabilities.
On the flip side, even ordinary phone calls and messages are often encrypted by default now, which used to be much more readily available to law enforcement.
It's such an interesting situation, society-wise.
[citation needed]
Interestingly, there’s a sort of perverse incentive going on here. If cops and governments hadn’t historically abused phone taps and sms interception - then strongly encrypted e2e tech like Signal wouldn’t have become “necessary” in the minds of non criminal users concerned about privacy, and we probably wouldn’t have had well known and widely used services/platforms like Signal and Telegram already in place for people to flock to when WhatsApp made their privacy blunder.
I’m sure GreyKey and NSO are perfectly happy with a cyber arms race requiring cops to buy more and more expensive “fancy tech” every year...
Interesting times indeed.